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weekendwarriorblog · 6 years ago

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INTERVIEW: “Puzzle” Director Marc Turtletaub

Running a bit late on this one, especially since I conducted this interview all the way back in January at the Sundance Film Festival where Marc Turtletaub’s second film as a director, Puzzle, first premiered.

Puzzle is based on Natalia Smirnoff’s 2009Argentine film Rompecabezas, and it starsKelly Macdonald (Trainspotting, Boardwalk Empire) as Agnes, a beleaguered housewife from Connecticut, who discovers she has an affinity for solving jigsaw puzzles after receiving one for her birthday. Wanting to find more challenging puzzles, she ventures into New York’s Greenwich Village (noteworthy factoid: on the block where this writer used to live) and sees an ad for a puzzle champ looking for a partner. Said champ is Irrfan Khan’s Robert, an eccentric New Yorker who demands Agnes practice with him frequently. To get away, Agnes tells her husband Louie (David Denman) that she’s taking care of a sick aunt, but as she continues to practice with Robert, one thing leads to another and Agnes’ dissatisfaction with her domestic life gets her to neglect her family. It’s puzzling, indeed.

Mr. Turtletaub is an interesting case when it comes to filmmakers, because he is better known as a producer and founder of Big Beach Films, who have been responsible for producing such Sundance hits as Safety Not Guaranteed and The Kings of Summer, as well as a little movie called Little Miss Sunshine, which premiered at Sundance in 2006. That movie was picked up by Fox Searchlight, grossed $100 million worldwide, but more importantly, it was nominated for four Oscars, winning two. (Turtletaub’s company also produced personal favorites Lovingand 3 Generations.)

I had a chance to talk with Turtletaub about his producing work but mainly about Puzzle, one of a bunch of movies involving women having mid-life crises, which unfortunately I didn’t get to write more about in this Sundance article. The movie received solid reviews and was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for a North American release, which it’s starting to roll out across the country. Kelly Macdonald is always great and gives another sublime performance as Agnes even though it wasn’t my favorite movie at Sundance, to be honest.

Anyway, onto the interview which includes a few thoughts on what Turtletaub and Big Beach look for in screenplays and filmmakers to work with.

Edward Douglas: You’re obviously one of the Sundance success stories, because you brought “Little Miss Sunshine” here, and that’s always a movie that’s cited when talking about Sundance. “Will this be as big as Little Miss Sunshine?” It’s like you set the standard.

Marc Turtletaub:Yeah, thank you. It was that bellwether, right?

It’s a standard that’s hard to match up to.

Turtletaub: Yeah, I know. Sometimes we think about that ourselves.

I assume you bought the rights for the Argentine film and had been developing it from the beginning? Had you always planned on directing it as well?

Turtletaub: Well, here's how it happened. It was originally developed by another production company, and Oren Moverman had worked on it and done a really strong screenplay. There was no director attached, and they sent it over to me -- I think they were working on attaching the right actor first, actually before the director and workings on the screenplay while they were attaching the right actors. When I got it, there were no actor attachments. It was sent over to our office from an agent saying it's a really strong screenplay, and I thought it was, and that's how it happened.

And you’d already been looking for something else to direct?

Turtletaub: I had been, and it's so rare to find something which is so well-written.

I imagine you're reading scripts all the time as a producer, so how different is it as far as reading scripts as a potential director? Is there a difference?

Turtletaub: Yeah, I think I know my strengths as a director, but generally, in our production company, we sort of lead from our heart. We look for material that feels intuitively like the right material for us. We try to make films which have meaning -- that's our North Star -- because we spend so much time and energy on a film, we want it to be something that has real meaning.

As a director, you spend even more time. Do you generally just plan to take a year off and produce so you can focus on directing a movie?

Turtletaub: Yeah, you say goodbye to your family. I try and remember who it was. I think it might have been Sidney Lumet who said that before he went to direct a film -- even though he was directing his films in New York -- they would have a going away party, even though he was going to come home every night.

How long ago did you actually find the screenplay for this one?

Turtletaub: Actually, it wasn't that long. I was trying to think of this. I believe it was around August of last year, which is really quick in this business, as you know. It was around August last year that I first laid eyes on it, and then began working on it.

So was Kelly already attached at that point, or no?

Turtletaub: No. No one was attached, and of course, the first person that you think on is the character of Agnes. I had fallen in love with Kelly as an actress years ago, with a movie called The Girl in the Café, which you, of course, would know, but not everybody else knows. I went, "Who is she?" not realizing she was the same person from Trainspotting, years later and very different role. Then of course, saw her a few years later in No Country for Old Men and then Boardwalk Empire, and you start to connect the dots and go, "What a really talented actor she is." So was thrilled when she was interested in the part.

And hasn't really done many leading-role type movies either. She was in this Christopher Robin movie last year, which was great, but it very low key, and she was the third credit after Domhnall Gleeson and Margot Robbie.

Turtletaub: It's rare to find a lead role for a woman who's not 22-years-old in a coming-of-age story. In a lot of ways, I think this is a coming-of-age story for somebody over the age of 40, which is unusual.

How about Irrfan Khan, who is also an amazing acto,r and he doesn't get to do as much stuff here as in India.

Turtletaub: No, the writing was strong and that attracted him. I loved Irrfan from his ... Of course, everyone's seen him in the larger movies, but I loved his performance in The Lunchbox, and then watching In Treatment, which is a good vehicle to see wonderful actors. So those two, in particular, excited me and then when he said “yes,” we had this wonderful international cast playing in an American movie. We had somebody from Scotland, somebody from India, and then Liv Hewson from Australia, so we had this wonderful cast being fleshed out.

Kelly is also so good at taking on an American accent, you might not even know that she’s Scottish, even when she takes on a British accent.

Turtletaub: She's a chameleon. Amazing lady.

You started this in August, which is as you say is very tight. Where did you end up shooting this? Did you get all the locations? I assume you didn’t do anything on a soundstage?

Turtletaub: No, we did half of one day on the stage. It was a 30-day shoot. We were shooting Yonkers for Bridgeport, Connecticut, and then, of course, New York City. It as smooth a shoot as I have been on in my 15-or-so years in the business. The process was really wonderful there.

As a producer, when you're working with directors, do you make a mental note when working with other directors, “I have to remember that for next time I direct?” You have worked with so many different directors, new and veteran.

Turtletaub: Yeah, I've worked with some great directors, and you learn something from all of them. You learn something from your mistakes obviously even more, but it's a difference between working as a producer and working as a director is [as] a producer – at least we are -- you're largely involved in working with the writers, working mostly with the director, and working somewhat with the editor. That's sort of your world, and once you're directing, of course, you're collaborating with 100 people, and so it's a very different experience.

Were you generally wearing two hats, on this or did you have someone else handling some of the producer roles you would normally be doing?

Turtletaub: My producing partner, Peter [Saraf], and I produce together, but we also had Renn Arthur and Guy Stodel, who had originally developed the project before it came to me, so it came to Peter and I after they had done a lot of work on the screenplay.

And Oren worked with another writer as well or was that also separate?

Turtletaub: It was a former writer that I never got to meet, so the only one that I worked with was Oren, and he was a delight to work with.

I’m not sure I realized they were in Bridgeport. I thought the family lived upstate somewhere.

Turtletaub: It's set in Bridgeport, Connecticut and she's a small-town woman who hasn't been to New York in years.

I used to live in Westport and took the train into New York all the time, and it’s a pretty long commute. You also have some shots in Grand Central and in the train, but I spoke to the director of “The Commuter,” and he told me they weren’t able to get any of that, and that had a bigger budget. How did you manage that?

Turtletaub: You accommodate their schedule -- you have to – and sometimes we found the trains would change two or three days before we were ready to shoot, and we had to say, "Okay, we can't go there. We've got to go out to Long Island," or "We've got to go somewhere else,” and you just have to be able to adapt. There were times that the subway was closed down in Grand Central. We were working in the atrium in Grand Central, and we wanted to go right to the subway, and it turned out they were doing some work there at the last moment and we had to go elsewhere. You just have to be flexible when you're making these small films.

But Grand Central seemed to be during working hours.

Turtletaub: It was during working hours. You get to section off. It was amazing how accommodating the folks were that walk through the big atrium. It was incredible to me. We'd say, "Could you go over here?" and they actually would do it, [laughs] because everyone wants to see a movie being made. But largely they just went on the stairs behind us, so they were all piled-up several hundred deep behind us on the stairs.

I don’t know what time you were shooting, but I’m not sure the commuters who want to go home at night would move for anyone if they had somewhere to be.

Turtletaub: Yeah, we didn't do it during rush hour. We probably had a group of extras that were sort of protecting Kelly as she walked through, but the security at Grand Central actually helped us to get onlookers moved aside.

I haven’t seen the original movie, so did you ever watch it after getting involved?

Turtletaub: Would you believe I saw it about two weeks ago? I wanted to finish the movie. I know Natalia, and I knew the movie was supposed to be wonderful, the Argentinian movie, but I just wanted to go in with clean eyes.

This is a general question, but you can talk about it with your movie. Does the script change a lot when you have actors like Kelly and Irrfan come on board? Does it change towards what they can do or do you work with the actors to make changes?

Turtletaub: To be honest, the script didn't change much. I think everyone was attracted, because we love the screenplay, and you don't often get a screenplay which is that fully-formed-- I don't-- so it was excellent. One the day occasionally, particularly Kelly would come in and say, "Could we try a few different words here or there?" But we're talking really minor changes. She¯ was smart about the screenplay. About the script.

Because of the nature of it, you have the Bridgeport section. You have the section with her and Irrfan. How did you work that out schedule-wise? I assume you had to film all the stuff in Irrfan’s house at the same time. How did you decide what order to shoot things?

Turtletaub: Well, we shot, it was a total of 30 days, so we shot four weeks in Yonkers. We were using Yonkers to double for Bridgeport, which included David Denman's work and the kids’ work-- Austin and Bubba--and then we went to New York and had roughly 10 days or so of shooting with Irrfan and Kelly and other folks in New York, so we broke it down that way.

That makes sense though, so you could establish the pattern of her life and then throw Irrfan in to have its own things. Since puzzles play such a large part in the core of the film, did you already have any kind of affinity for puzzles yourself? Did you have people around who were good at assembling puzzles to help out?

Turtletaub: I didn't. Of course, I watched a documentary on competitive jigsaw puzzling. We went to a meet-up of puzzlers, but I don't have a strong affinity. But to me, it was just a way to get into the story. At the end of the day, it's really about her transformation and how she transforms. How that ripples out into her whole family and to the people she meets. In terms of affinity, I would say Kelly got hooked, and there were several people on the crew that also got hooked on puzzles, and so in between takes, you'd go over and there was almost always, every day, a big puzzle, and everybody would add a piece here or there. Walk in, walk away. Sometimes I'd be ready to do a take, and we had to say, "Where's Kelly?" And she was invariably over at the puzzle.

How did she get good enough to pull off what she does in the movie, because she seems very fast.

Turtletaub: She's really adept to start off with. It's not fake. She really is adept, and then she got better and better once she got on set.

You have another movie at Sundance called “White Fang” which I haven’t seen, but if you were making this movie over the last six months, did you have to set aside other Big Beach projects?

Turtletaub: You focus. You have to focus. But White Fang was begun about two-and-a-half years ago, so we had been working on that in Paris and Luxembourg. And as Puzzle started to ramp up -- we didn't actually shoot until June of 2017 -- so the pre-production and all that really happened in 2017. But as we entered 2017 my focus had obviously become very strongly on directing.

As a producer, what do you look for in a script? Do you have a weekly time to sit down and read scripts?

Turtletaub: We do. We do weekly have a conversation of everything that we've read and if something rises to a level where we like it, someone really likes it, then several of us will read it. Usually, it works its way up to Peter and I, who are the heads of Big Beach, and we'll read it once we know there's enough folks that really got excited about it -- people we really trust. Of course, some things that are time-sensitive, we'll jump on those sooner. As to what we like, we like a singular voice. In terms of the writing, we're very much material-driven, so we look for original, singular voices, and when you think about some of the movies that we've made, there's often a unique voice. So the woman that wrote Sunshine Cleaning. The man that wrote Little Miss Sunshine. Those were really unique voices. And Loving, and so forth.

I spoke to Valerie Faris and John Dayton for “Little Miss Sunshine” and I wondered how you found them to direct that. I know they’d done music videos before making that film.

Turtletaub: Yeah, our producing partners Ron and Al, had recommended them and I can't remember because it was so many years ago, but it seemed like there were about 10 or 11 directors that wanted to direct the material, and so we interviewed all of them, and John and Val just came through. And though they had not directed feature, we'd seen their work, and loved it and loved their passion. And then it took five years after we ... we bought it and then we optioned it out to a studio. It took five years before we ultimately bought it back and John and Val stayed on the project during that whole time.

Going back to reading scripts, do a lot of the screenplays generally have a filmmaker involved as well or are you generally looking for scripts and not necessarily packages?

Turtletaub: Not always. Jeff Nichols was attached to Loving. On Little Miss Sunshine we didn't have anyone. On Sunshine Cleaning, we didn't have an attachment, but on many, we do. On Safety Not Guaranteed there was an attachment, Colin Trevorrow, so it's a mixed bag.

I want to ask about “Three Generations,” because I really liked that film, but then it was delayed for years and years, but now, a movie about a transgender teen would be very timely, so do you feel it was too far ahead of its time?

Turtletaub: I don't think it was ahead of its time. I think it was right in the zeitgeist when the movie was ready. And then it was delayed at the studio, who wanted to do continued work on the film after they'd purchased it. I think ideally, it would have come out perhaps a year earlier.

At one point it was supposed to come out right after it premiered at Toronto.

Turtletaub: I think it would have been the right movie at the right time, had it come out then. And unfortunately, it was released about a year, or year-and-a-half later. What was interesting about it for me, is that it wasn't just about Elle Fanning, who's going through the transition. But it was really three generations. It was the story of her grandmother, Susan Sarandon, who is a lesbian grandmother who said, "Why can't you just be lesbian? Do you have to go through this." And her mother, Naomi Watts. You've got the perspective of the whole family, which is what made it interesting to me.

Puzzle is now playing in select cities. (Photo Credits: All the Puzzle photos are courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. Little Miss Sunshine photo is from Fox Searchlight and the picture of Turtletaub with Kelly Macdonald is from Getty Images.)

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